In the chaotic scramble to replace term-limited Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2026, California Democrats are revealing once again how little they value competence or accountability. Newsom’s inner circle, left adrift after Rep. Eric Swalwell’s spectacular collapse amid rape and sexual harassment allegations, has turned its gaze to a familiar face from the Biden administration’s failures: former Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra.
Once polling in the low single digits, Becerra has surged to around 10 percent in recent surveys, buoyed by increased social media chatter and a quick pivot by consultants who had been all-in on Swalwell until the scandals forced a humiliating retreat.
This is not a story of fresh leadership or bold vision for a state drowning in homelessness, crime, and unaffordable housing. It is the predictable recycling of the same political machine that has turned California into a cautionary tale. Becerra, who served as California’s attorney general before joining Biden’s cabinet, now benefits from the vacuum left by Swalwell’s downfall.
Longtime Newsom allies—including figures like Courtni Pugh, Lindsey Cobia, and Jason Elliott—had thrown their weight behind Swalwell, alongside unions and independent expenditure groups led by Bearstar Strategies operatives Ace Smith, Sean Clegg, and Juan Rodriguez. When the accusations surfaced, those operatives executed a swift U-turn.
Now, agencies tied to Newsom’s orbit, such as LaMont Digital, are reportedly aligning with Becerra. Newsom himself maintains a studied neutrality, issuing bland statements about the “depth of talent” in the Democratic Party while privately expressing reservations about Becerra’s record.
Becerra’s sudden viability exposes the rot at the heart of California’s one-party dominance. As attorney general, he weaponized lawsuits against the first Trump administration more than a hundred times, prioritizing ideological warfare over practical governance. His stint leading HHS under Biden placed him at the center of a federal health bureaucracy that oversaw vaccine mandates, border chaos with public health implications, and policies that strained hospitals and eroded public trust. Californians who fled high taxes and failing services during those years have every reason to question whether rewarding such a resume will reverse the state’s decline. Yet the machine grinds on, elevating insiders who promise continuity rather than correction.
The irony is thick. Democrats who lecture endlessly about “protecting democracy” and “defending norms” now scramble to install a Biden-era retread after their preferred candidate imploded under the weight of serious personal allegations. Swalwell’s rapid fall—complete with lingering rumors that insiders like Becerra himself admitted had circulated for years—should have prompted soul-searching. Instead, it triggered a game of musical chairs among the same consultants and donors.
Newsom’s orbit, ever pragmatic, appears less interested in reforming the state than preserving influence. Becerra’s campaign attributes his polling bump to social media momentum, but the real driver is the absence of alternatives within a party allergic to genuine competition.
California’s challenges demand more than recycled résumés. Skyrocketing housing costs, visible decay in major cities, and businesses fleeing for red states are not abstract policy debates; they are the direct result of progressive governance that prioritizes symbolism over results. Becerra’s emphasis on “rebuilding the California Dream” rings hollow against that backdrop. Voters have watched as promises of compassion produced tent cities, as aggressive environmental rules coexisted with blackouts and high energy costs, and as legal activism substituted for effective law enforcement.
This episode also raises pointed questions about media and institutional complicity. Rumors about Swalwell had apparently circulated in Democratic circles long before formal accusations forced his exit, yet the party machinery pressed forward until the scandal became impossible to ignore. The same networks that amplified every Trump-era controversy now pivot seamlessly to the next establishment choice. Californians deserve transparency, not another chapter in the saga of insider protection.
Newsom’s careful distance from the fray—coupled with his own ambitions for higher office—only underscores the cynicism. His statement praising the “diverse group of leaders” committed to “California’s progress” reads like boilerplate designed to offend no one in the machine while signaling nothing substantive. Progress, in this context, too often means doubling down on the policies that have made the state a magnet for problems rather than solutions.
As the 2026 race unfolds, the emergence of Becerra as a dark-horse contender illustrates a deeper truth about entrenched power. When one flawed candidate falls, the apparatus does not open the field to reformers or outsiders; it elevates another veteran of the same battles. Californians weary of decline have an opportunity to demand better, but the early signals from Sacramento suggest the machine intends to stay in control.
Yet Scripture reminds us that no earthly kingdom escapes judgment for its stewardship. As the prophet Isaiah declared, “Woe unto them that decree unrighteous decrees, and that write grievousness which they have prescribed” (Isaiah 10:1). California’s leaders would do well to heed the warning against perpetuating systems that burden the people rather than serve them. True renewal requires repentance from failed ideologies, not another shuffle of familiar faces.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
